To be clear, when I first heard In The City, in about 1977, I thought I was in heaven. Its pithy, guitar-driven anger seemed to sum up my (just about) teenage times, and it would still be up there now in my top 5 ever singles (since you ask, along with Todd Rundgren's I Saw the Light, Backfield in Motion by Mel and Tim, Hold Back the Night - the Trammps version, not Graham Parker's - and, a final guilty pleasure this, Jump, Van Halen's tribute to the Who). The highest tribute I can pay to In The City is that it made me want to be working class. Briefly.
But I never became a Jam fan, unlike so many of my friends. After that cracking start, their music seemed to me increasingly leaden and boring. Whilst Weller was a perfectly competent guitarist, bass player Bruce Foxton annoyed me with his twangy Rickenbacker, and Rick Buckler must surely be the luckiest bad drummer since Ringo (actually Ringo was a pretty good drummer, but that's another post on another day): surely the first obligation of a drummer is to be able to keep time? I increasingly found Weller vain and preachy, the righteous ire of his early stuff descending into mere shouting.
This view was sealed when an ex-girlfriend, whose company acted for him in a professional capacity, told me that she had seen Weller's accounts. They showed, she said, that he was spending £5,000 a year on hair replacement therapy. Now this was in the 80s, probably about the Style Council period, and £5,000 bought even more then than it does now. So the Red Wedge campaigner, scourge of the Tories, sea-green incorruptible chronicler of society's injustices and failings, was worried about losing his hair. This seemed to confirm my impression that Weller was not the genuine article.
Over the years I have not followed Weller's career closely, but I thought about him recently when an admiring profile appeared in the Graun penned by notorious druggie Decca Aitkenhead. Weller is still taking care of his appearance, it seems. Aitkenhead writes that he "resembles an elder statesman of rock so precisely, he looks almost too perfect to be true - like a flawlessly styled, slightly over-obsessive lead singer in a Paul Weller tribute band". Weller, it turns out, has two children by his first wife, singer Dee C Lee, a third by a make-up artist, a fourth and fifth by one Samantha Stock, whom he recently ditched, taking up with a backing singer half his age with whom he now has children number six and seven. The children go to private school, and Weller lives in Maida Vale in London.
None of this makes Weller a bad person, or even, necessarily, a bad artist. Neither does it matter much that it makes him a different person from the one he seemed to be in 1977. It does however make it slightly surprising that this man, whose reputation rests at least partly on his integrity and radicalism, should be revered for living the life of the successful selfish middle-aged capitalist.
P.S. A report in Popbitch in October 2015 reported Weller's presence at University College School Hampstead's Open Day. Fees £15,000 per year. Up the workers!
P.S. A report in Popbitch in October 2015 reported Weller's presence at University College School Hampstead's Open Day. Fees £15,000 per year. Up the workers!
